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An Electrifying Read
Dr. Marc Landry’s IEEE Life Member History Fellowship led to the publication of his new book, “Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age.”
During the late 1800s, the water flowing through the Alps – a more than 700-mile-long mountain range that stretches across the European countries of Monaco, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia – became sought after for its ability to generate electricity and replace coal as the region’s predominant energy source. Dams built to generate hydroelectricity transformed the Alps in ways that would come to impact the region’s economy, military position for the impending World Wars, and environmental future.
In a fascinating new book titled “Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age” (published in January 2025 by Stanford University Press), author Marc Landry, PhD discusses how dam-building in the 19th and 20th centuries transformed the Alps into Europe’s “battery” – an energy landscape designed to store and produce electricity for use throughout the Continent – and created other far-reaching implications related to fossil fuels and climate change.
The recipient of an IEEE Life Member History Fellowship in 2011, Dr. Landry completed his dissertation, which became the basis for the book, with support from the IEEE Life Members Fund and through extensive historical research conducted in archives across Europe, especially in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Italy.
A native of Colchester, Vermont, USA, Dr. Landry earned his PhD in History at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., USA, in 2013 and currently serves as Associate Professor of History, Marshall Plan Endowed Professor in Austrian Studies and Director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies at the University of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Previously, Dr. Landry was the Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor in Austrian-American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
The IEEE Life Member History Fellowship supports one year of full-time graduate work or one year of post-doctoral research for a scholar who’s received their PhD within the previous four years in the history of any of IEEE’s designated fields. Providing a stipend of US$25,000 and a research budget of up to US$3,000, Fellows are selected based on their potential for pursuing research in and contributing to the history of IEEE’s designated fields (which include Engineering, Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Physical Sciences, Biological and Medical Sciences, Mathematics, Technical Communications, Education, Management, and Law and Policy).
According to Dr. Landry, who was recently interviewed about Mountain Battery (www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYVkQS0Gf7k) by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies in Media, PA, USA, researching and writing his book was an extremely positive experience and one that wouldn’t have been possible without the strong support and extensive resources provided by IEEE.
“Having the IEEE’s encouragement as a junior scholar allowed me to continue with a project that offered new perspectives on the history of electrification – one in which I could emphasize the underappreciated centrality of electrification in modern energy history while shedding light on the inextricable connections between landscape, environment, and electrification,” a grateful Dr. Landry shared. “Receiving the IEEE Life Member History Fellowship provided the crucial financial support that enabled me to access important sources in distant archives as well as have the necessary time to write up my conclusions.”
For more information on Dr. Landry’s book, visit www.sup.org/books/history/mountain-battery. For more details of the IEEE Life Member History Fellowship, visit www.ieee.org/about/history-center/fellowship.html.
